Words matter. These are the best Michael Specter Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Daily vitamins are of no value.
We’re lying ourselves into believing things are untrue, like organic food will solve all our problems, or vitamins will make us healthy, or we don’t need to vaccinate our children.
Meat supplies a variety of nutrients – among them iron, zinc, and Vitamin B12 – that are not readily found in plants. We can survive without it; millions of vegetarians choose to do so, and billions of others have that choice imposed upon them by poverty.
When people say they prefer organic food, what they often seem to mean is they don’t want their food tainted with pesticides and their meat shot full of hormones or antibiotics. Many object to the way a few companies – Monsanto is the most famous of them – control so many of the seeds we grow.
The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.
If caught early, Lyme is easily treated with antibiotics. But activists, and many researchers, have long contended that tens of thousands of people remain unaware that they have been infected – sometimes for years, during which the bacterium can spread to the heart, nervous system, and brain.
Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
Clearly, some of the reason people embrace alternatives and reject vaccines is that they are angry and mistrustful of government and of pharmaceutical conglomerates. More than that, we pay too much for health care, it’s not good enough, and the system is too complex. We need alternatives.
We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother’s birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms – a hundred trillion or more.
I started to write about science and medicine at the ‘Washington Post,’ in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
There are many theories about the best way to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere – some are ludicrous, others are at least worth study. The most commonly discussed plan is to lace the sky with reflective chemicals.
If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
With a hundred and seventy-eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a molecule of DNA, B.G.I. produces at least a quarter of the world’s genomic data – more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other scientific institution.
Deliberately modifying the earth’s atmosphere would be a desperate gamble with significant risks. Yet the more likely climate change is to cause devastation, the more attractive even the most perilous attempts to mitigate those changes will become.
There has never been a verified scientific report that chelation therapy, a gluten-free diet, or anything else can cure autism.
Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern.
It is not possible to assert publicly that Monsanto is anything other than venal without being accused of being a sellout, a fraud, or worse.
Someone told me that they didn’t want to take a flu shot because they didn’t want to put a foreign substance in their body. What do they think they do at dinner every night?
The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.
The numbers matter: underreporting of Lyme disease obscures the true burden of the illnesses, on individuals as well as on health-care systems. It also makes it harder to convince Congress to fund research.
Newspapers and magazines are vanishing. But science writers are not. In fact, they are becoming so adept and varied that I hardly have time to read ‘Gawker’ anymore.
If people want to believe that our ancestors were riding around on dinosaurs or that the protracted, increasing, and devastating warming of the Earth is just nature doing its thing – I guess I feel I have more useful battles to fight.
It doesn’t seem to matter how often vaccines are proved safe or supplements are shown to offer nothing of value. When people don’t like facts, they ignore them.
Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.
Most reputable scientists agree that climate change is real and that the effects are likely to be bad. But nobody can say for sure exactly what ‘bad’ means. The safest and most equitable way out of this horrific mess is simple: cut fossil-fuel emissions.
Consumers deserve the right to know what’s in their food – and obviously, most people want that choice. It’s hard to see how more knowledge about the products we eat every day can hurt us.
By themselves, genetically engineered crops will not end hunger or improve health or bolster the economies of struggling countries. They won’t save the sight of millions or fortify their bones. But they will certainly help.
There is a major problem with reliance on placebos, like most vitamins and antioxidants. Everyone gets upset about Big Science, Big Pharma, but they love Big Placebo.
I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Although it may seem callous to say so, millions of Americans are lucky that Magic Johnson was infected with H.I.V. There is no way of calculating how many lives he has saved. No advertising agency could have invented a better, or more effective, role model.
Throughout the United States, at the dawn of the Progressive era, dozens of laws and regulations were established to empower police officers, public-health officials, and even the armed forces to vaccinate at will, and, if necessary, at gunpoint.
Newspapers and magazines have been valuable to us precisely because they apply filters to information, otherwise known as editing, and often the Internet seems valuable for exactly the opposite reason: You can get your news without a filter.
Denialist arguments are often bolstered by accurate information taken wildly out of context, wielded selectively, and supported by fake experts who often don’t seem fake at all.
We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds – the same as our brain.
There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There’s not much to do about them.
